Never Let Me Go

This book had some really interesting questions, I'm just on the fence about how it brought those questions across. The premise was very interesting, the storytelling was engaging, and I was never really bored throughout it all. The beginning started off really strong and sinister but I found it meandered somewhat as it went on. This is a 3 to 3.5 stars for me.

Now an adult with a job caring for patients, Kathy reminisces about her times in Hailsham, a prestigious boarding school that she had attended in her childhood until she was sixteen. Prominent in her memories and amongst her Hailsham friends are Ruth and Tommy, with whom Kathy grows up and subsequently leaves Hailsham. In the outside world, the three of them seek to find out the reason for Hailsham's existence.

While there are some sci-fi elements to this story, it's extremely subtle and really only serves as a backdrop. A lot of good questions are raised (all of them too spoilery to list here), and you can't help thinking about the whole premise of it even after the book is done. The climax and reveal of the story never hit that hard though, and I'm not sure if this was intentional since Ishiguro freely gives out pretty large hints from the very beginning. It was easy to have a good idea what premise of the story was from the first few chapters if you paid enough attention. I also felt that Kathy's perspective felt oddly sterile and detached at some points, even during moments that we as readers have been looking forward to for several chapters before. It makes climactic moments feel a bit like a let-down, but again I'm not sure if this is deliberate on Ishiguro's part, considering the context of the whole plot.

About the themes, plot, and ending:

I liked the premise of questioning medical ethics, especially when it comes to entities created by science for the sole purpose of serving "real" human beings. It's just come to a blur in this book because the clones being manufactured for their organs to be havested seem to be every bit as real as regular people. Cloning has been a hot topic in medical science for ages now, so the premise of this book honestly doesn't sound absurdly far-fetched. The idea that a more "superior" version of yourself is being essentially groomed and then farmed is terrifying and sounds inhumane, but at the same time what happens if these clones are let loose upon the world?A particular interesting thought that struck me was how the clones are not able to have children. As clones, they would have an identical DNA to someone else who was their "model", but being manufactured they had had no say in where their DNA comes from. Whether they had previously been sterilised or genetically modified before birth, the clones do not have the choice to pass on this DNA by having children. It's implied that their DNA is not their own to pass on as they will, since their entire existence is a mirror of someone else's and the society they're in demands that they therefore serve the needs of "regular" humans. It certainly poses a really interesting conundrum that I hadn't previously thought about, regarding this whole thing about whether an entity should be allowed to pass on DNA if it had been copied wholesale from someone else's for specific purposes.Halfway through though, I didn't quite like how the book devolved into a bit of teenage drama with the whole love triangle between Ruth, Kathy, and Tommy, and how Ruth and Kathy just went on catfighting for most of their lives. I wasn't really sure what that accomplished in the larger scheme of things, and plus I just didn't understand why the two girls went on being so toxic and mean to each other but still being super reliant on the other. It was a whole lot of teenage drama that I didn't sign up for.The ending felt a little anticlimactic. I was really looking forward to the whole big denouement with Miss Emily and Madame, but they didn't really say a lot of things that I hadn't already figured out by that point. There wasn't a big secret sinister plot at the back of it. After that, Tommy and Kathy just went on with the rest of their predestined lives, donating until they completed. It felt like nothing much was discovered (especially since Tommy and Kathy had already somewhat known the truth of their beings all along anyway) and nothing much was changed.